GENERAL FUSION

Michel Laberge was a physicist working at a laser printer company who became obsessed with solving fusion. In 2002, he quit his job and founded General Fusion with a radical approach: instead of expensive superconducting magnets or massive laser arrays, use mechanical pistons to compress plasma.

The concept: inject plasma into a spinning liquid metal cavity, then fire hundreds of pistons simultaneously to compress the plasma until fusion occurs. It sounds insane, but the physics checks out — and it's dramatically cheaper to build than a tokamak.

Nuclear fusion energy company using a unique Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) approach. Instead of the tokamak design (used by ITER and Commonwealth Fusion) or laser fusion (used by NIF), General Fusion compresses plasma using pistons — like a mechanical version of the sun.

Revenue is pre-commercial — the company is building a fusion demonstration plant in the UK (at the Culham Science Centre) to prove the technology works at scale. The bet: fusion could provide limitless clean energy.

Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) reactor design, Fusion Demonstration Plant (under construction at Culham, UK), and Plasma Injector Technology (the core system that creates and compresses plasma). The company has built and tested individual components.

The demonstration plant will integrate them for the first time.

Build the demonstration plant, prove the physics, then license the technology. General Fusion's strategy is to build a small demonstration reactor at Culham Science Centre in the UK, prove that MTF produces net energy, and then license the design to utilities and energy companies worldwide.

The modular, relatively simple design (compared to tokamaks) could theoretically be mass-produced, making fusion energy commercially viable.

Fusion is the hardest engineering problem on Earth. The joke in physics is that fusion is "always 30 years away" — and it has been for 70 years.

General Fusion's piston-based approach is novel but unproven at power-producing scale. The plasma must be compressed to 150 million degrees Celsius in milliseconds with perfect symmetry.

Any imperfection kills the reaction. The UK demonstration plant (planned for 2027) will be the first real test of whether MTF works at meaningful scale.

Jeff Bezos, Shopify founder Tobias Lutke, Temasek, Chrysalix Venture Capital, BDC Capital, and the Government of Canada have backed General Fusion.